Changes & Chances
Chapter 1 It Began with Raffles
Rome, in her proudest state, could not boast of such an accession of power, or equal means for promoting the general interests of mankind.
W Thorn, in The Conquest of Java (1815) lauding the spread of the British Empire in Asia.
Raffles’s name is inextricably linked with two incontrovertible forces in the modernization of Asia: British imperialism and Christian missions. As our story unfolds, it becomes clear that All Saints church has benefited greatly and suffered sorely from its connection with those forces.
A little bit about the great man himself. Thomas Stamford Raffles was a true hero in an age when Britain produced an unprecedented number of colourful heroes. His contemporaries were warriors like Nelson and Wellington; romantic rebels like Byron and Shelley; statesmen like Pitt the Younger and Wilberforce, people of intelligence and vision but even more, courage and perseverance. Heroic ages are neither lacklustre nor serene and Britain in the opening decade of the nineteenth century was restless. Undeterred by the loss of the American colonies, the British ruling class was building a new empire with possessions in every continent. Colonies like Upper Canada and New South Wales were administered directly by the Crown, while India and a chain of ports from St Helena in the Atlantic to Canton in mainland China were governed by the Directors of the British East India Company (EIC). They were spurred on not only by the profit motive but by bitter rivalry with the Napoleonic Empire. Unlike the Catholic powers, Portugal and Spain, which had accepted Papal mediation in carving up the globe between themselves three centuries before, Britain and France were proud and implacable enemies bowing to no higher authority.
Although the oligarchy of the wealthy and well-connected monopolised the church, parliament and military, sheer courage, perseverance and genius could break through the glass ceiling of social class, particularly in the growing Empire. Raffles began his career with the East India Company as a 14-year-old clerk because his widowed mother could not afford to educate him any further. His fortunes rose quickly when he made two wise moves, marrying the intelligent and vivacious Olivia and taking up a position in India. His exertions and conscientiousness were soon rewarded with the appointment as Company Resident in the newly acquired port of Penang. There he acquired his lifelong interest in the peoples of the world’s largest archipelago extending from Sumatra to New Guinea and from Borneo to Java.
From Penang Raffles looked south to Java, the richest and most populated island at the centre of these fascinating islands. It represents only seven per cent of the land mass of Indonesia but through most of its history has held something more than sixty per cent of the people, of which the majority are Javanese. Javanese culture and political influence have always dominated Indonesia. This is because in Central Java wet-rice growing on a large-scale was established very early, enabling a food surplus and the consequent development of a civilisation which could support the artisans and artists who developed the arts into one of the major streams of Asian culture. The marvel of Borobodur, gracious court dances, entrancing shadow–puppet theatre, intricate batik designs and hypnotic gamelan orchestras are the best known examples. However, the island of Java is also home to other significant ethnic groups, including the Sundanese majority in West Java and the Madurese minority in East Java, while Jakarta itself has been a racial and cultural melting-pot from the beginning. Although Java has been traditionally the rice bowl of Indonesia, the other, less populated, islands have always been more productive in export commodities, including spices, rubber, oil, minerals, timber and palm-oil.
British traders had been visiting the trading ports of Banten and Sunda Kelapa (Jakarta) at the western end of the north coast of Java as long as the Dutch. However, after some very ugly incidents like the Amboyna massacre, the two countries agreed that the East Indies was big enough for both of them and Java was yielded to the Dutch. From its inception in 1602 until its demise in 1799 the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), the Dutch East India Company, helped enrich Holland and turned Sunda Kelapa into Batavia, its headquarters and the Queen of the Orient. However, since the 1700s Holland, bled by European wars, had been in decline and the VOC, through corruption, was bankrupt. In 1806 Holland was absorbed into the French Empire, as were its colonial possessions. Batavia, in her prime the Queen of the Orient, had lost her bloom and was more of a distressed dowager.
Raffles’s brilliant mind quickly gained an impressive knowledge and understanding of the whole region, soon developing a practical plan to incorporate the Dutch East Indies into the British mercantile empire. He won the confidence of the Governor-General in Calcutta, Lord Minto, by proving that, contrary to popular prejudice, the Malacca Strait was navigable for large ships by sending a warship to chart a route among the coral reefs. This alternative to the Sunda Strait immediately facilitated the invasion of Java and in the longer term provided a new route for Far Eastern trade. After this navigational coup, Minto entrusted him with planning the invasion of Java and subsequently with the Lieutenant Governorship of the island. The political motive for the conquest of Java was the conflict with the Napoleonic Empire, while the strategic motive was the EIC's growing dismay at Dutch control over the Sunda Strait, the major route to the Far East, which they exercised from their naval base at Batavia.
The British forces sailed from Calcutta, landed at Cilincing, west of Tanjung Priok and occupied the city of Batavia (now the suburb of Kota), which had been deserted by the combined Dutch and French forces. This Napoleonic army made a strategic retreat to the strongly fortified position in the area of Meester Cornelis a little over three kilometres south-east of where the church now stands. A small battle was fought at a roadblock at Weltevreeden on 10 August a few hundred metres east of where the church now stands. The British then pushed southward and laid siege to the enemy position of Cornelis. It had a perimeter of 8 kilometres and is now the area known as Kebon Manggis, Kampung Melayu and Jatinegara. The two longest sides were formed by the Ciliwung, and a canal known as the Slokan. The main British assault came on 26 August and turned into a rout with the remnants of the Napoleonic forces retreating to Buitzenborg (Bogor). It is at this point that history first intersects with present-day All Saints. For in a shady spot in front of the church lies a heavy gravestone. Regular sweeping has kept the epitaph clean of lichen, so the visitor can still read:
Here lie the Remains of Lieutenant Colonel WILLIAM CAMPBELL of His Britannic Majesty’s 78th Regt who died on the 28th of Aug, 1811 of Wounds received on the 26th of that Month while bravely leading on his Regt to attack the strongly fortified Lines of CORNELIS defended by a gallant Enemy. To Him, who living was beloved by all for his gentle Manners, and his manly Virtues; Who in Death; merited and received the Applause of his Country; To Him, the Companion of many happy Years, and the Father of her Children; this frail Memorial of unperishing Regard is erected by his afflicted Widow.
I have tried to visualise the scene in the pre-dawn light of 26 August 1811. A dark mist would have hung over the Ciliwung thick and acrid from the gunpowder. The crack of muskets and the crash of cannons was mingled with the whinneying of horses and the cries of men. Lieutenant Colonel William Campbell of the 78th led his highlanders along the high road, and charged across the ditch and through the palisade under a rain of grape and musketry, throwing Napoleon's men back. One minute he was waving his sword, urging his men forward, with the Gaelic war cry, "Tulloch Ard". The next, he was felled by a huge blow to his thighs. His men continued to surge forward urged on by the compelling music of the bagpipes and the scent of victory. Only his aide stopped to attend to his fallen master. Rolling him on to his back he saw that his thighs had been ripped and the bones shattered by grape-shot, fired at close-range from a cannon. The aide knew immediately that Campbell was doomed to an agonising death. Amputation was useless. He died two days afterwards and was quickly buried at the old cemetery near the Main Post Office. It would have been a puzzling scene to the inquisitive local Malay families. The rows of sunburned giants facing the grave. The notes of a solitary piper piercing the awed silence. The lowered banner with the elephant badge. The 78th Regiment wore the distinctive Green Mackenzie tartan and tall bearskin hats. They were known as the "Ross-shire buffs" because of the pale, buffalo leather facings on their red coats. The men of Ross-shire are noted for their height, which derives from their Viking ancestry. The regiment had been raised 20 years before by the Mackenzie chieftain, and included 300 of his own crofters. In the succeeding years they had won glory in India, particularly at the battle of Assaye, so their banner featured an elephant and the single word "Assaye". These highlanders had a reputation for esprit de corps and good behaviour that was maintained not by the brutal discipline common at the time, but by an appeal to an ancient sense of honour.
Of the 12,000 British troops who set out from India, about one quarter was sick by the time they landed in Java. From the 10-26 August, there were 889 casualties comprising 143 killed, 733 wounded and 13 missing. British forces subsequently established control over the whole of Java and South Sumatra by smaller battles at Semarang, Palembang and Yogyakarta. Raffles also stamped out piracy by destroying pirate nests, the biggest being at Sambasse in north-west Borneo.
Although not a soldier Raffles was nevertheless a hero, and like all heroes he faced his many hardships with courage. These included chronic ill-health, which seemed to plague any European who sought to live an energetic life in the tropics, tragedies like the deaths of his first wife at Batavia, his children, his sister and brother-in-law later in Bencoolen, and the disastrous loss by fire of his manuscripts and important collection of botanical and zoological specimens prior to his return to England. Then there was the enmity of those who should have been friends and allies. When researching the Raffles era I came across a glaring case of malicious bias in Major Thorn’s Conquest of Java, an absorbing eyewitness account of the British conquest of the Dutch East Indies and a useful description of the geography, culture and economy of the various islands. It has recently been republished as a facsimile edition with delightful maps and prints. Oddly, it omits any reference to Raffles. In a breathtakingly vindictive manner, Thorn had written him out of the book. He had taken the side of General Gillespie, his superior officer, who nursed a bitter grudge against the civilian governor and tried to destroy his career. In spite of all this, Raffles was not deterred and in 1819 founded and subsequently nurtured Singapore, again earning the wrath of a military man, Major Farquhar.
Although the British occupation of Java, from 1811 to 1816, was a brief interlude in three and a half centuries of Dutch rule, it is looked upon as a significant period of enlightened government and reform. Raffles had an imperial vision of a confederacy of Malay states extending from Aceh to Mindanao, under the Governor-General in Calcutta. Civilising measures would include suppression of slavery and piracy, encouragement of trade, codification and reformation of Malay law and, pertinently, the propagation and protection of Christianity. It is the last of these measures that is important to our story. Although not an evangelical Christian himself, he was nevertheless overtly supportive of Christian missions, becoming the Founding Patron of the Java Auxiliary of the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) in 1814. Much of this was due to his close relationship to his cousin, Rev. Thomas Raffles, a Congregationalist minister in Liverpool and a Director of the London Missionary Society. They were both great men in their fields and engaged in regular correspondence. So it was Thomas Raffles who urged the other Thomas Raffles to establish Protestant missions in Java.
First of the missionaries to be welcomed by Raffles was William Robinson of the Calcutta-based Baptist Missionary Society (BMS), who arrived in 1813 to work among the Javanese, being soon joined by Trowt, Reily and Phillips. The BMS found the Javanese more resistant than other groups they were working among, so interest in the Java Mission soon waned, leaving Robinson alone in Java. In Batavia he found opportunities to work among the English-speaking military, also learning Malay so he could work among the Muslim people of Batavia. He is important to our story when he appears later as one of the links between the Raffles era and the founders of the church.
The missionary cohorts were further strengthened by the arrival in May 1814 of three missionaries of the Nederlands Zendeling-Genootschap under the auspices of the LMS. They were the Germans Kam, Brückner and Supper. Kam soon transferred to work in Ambon and Brückner to Semarang in Central Java, where his views on baptism changed, and he transferred to the BMS. Raffles appointed Supper as minister of the Dutch Church in Batavia and assisted him in founding the aforementioned Java Auxiliary of the British and Foreign Bible Society, of which he became the Secretary. Until his death in 1817, Supper worked in Batavia, where he preached to the native Christians, and distributed Chinese scriptures and tracts. Another German LMS missionary, Thomsen, arrived in 1816 to work among the Malays, but his wife’s poor health led to their removal in 1817. It is worth recording Raffles’ rather indulgent opinion of some of these missionaries in a letter of 1815 to the Rev. Thomas Raffles. He wrote that Supper “is a good, simple creature, rather silly but amiable…. He is doing very well.” Trowt “is not doing much…. He has been very unwell….” Raffles also recorded the personal assistance he gave to these men, counselling Supper who had been in love, helping Trowt in some financial difficulties and providing Milne with information about the Javanese.
Rome, in her proudest state, could not boast of such an accession of power, or equal means for promoting the general interests of mankind.
W Thorn, in The Conquest of Java (1815) lauding the spread of the British Empire in Asia.
Raffles’s name is inextricably linked with two incontrovertible forces in the modernization of Asia: British imperialism and Christian missions. As our story unfolds, it becomes clear that All Saints church has benefited greatly and suffered sorely from its connection with those forces.
A little bit about the great man himself. Thomas Stamford Raffles was a true hero in an age when Britain produced an unprecedented number of colourful heroes. His contemporaries were warriors like Nelson and Wellington; romantic rebels like Byron and Shelley; statesmen like Pitt the Younger and Wilberforce, people of intelligence and vision but even more, courage and perseverance. Heroic ages are neither lacklustre nor serene and Britain in the opening decade of the nineteenth century was restless. Undeterred by the loss of the American colonies, the British ruling class was building a new empire with possessions in every continent. Colonies like Upper Canada and New South Wales were administered directly by the Crown, while India and a chain of ports from St Helena in the Atlantic to Canton in mainland China were governed by the Directors of the British East India Company (EIC). They were spurred on not only by the profit motive but by bitter rivalry with the Napoleonic Empire. Unlike the Catholic powers, Portugal and Spain, which had accepted Papal mediation in carving up the globe between themselves three centuries before, Britain and France were proud and implacable enemies bowing to no higher authority.
Although the oligarchy of the wealthy and well-connected monopolised the church, parliament and military, sheer courage, perseverance and genius could break through the glass ceiling of social class, particularly in the growing Empire. Raffles began his career with the East India Company as a 14-year-old clerk because his widowed mother could not afford to educate him any further. His fortunes rose quickly when he made two wise moves, marrying the intelligent and vivacious Olivia and taking up a position in India. His exertions and conscientiousness were soon rewarded with the appointment as Company Resident in the newly acquired port of Penang. There he acquired his lifelong interest in the peoples of the world’s largest archipelago extending from Sumatra to New Guinea and from Borneo to Java.
From Penang Raffles looked south to Java, the richest and most populated island at the centre of these fascinating islands. It represents only seven per cent of the land mass of Indonesia but through most of its history has held something more than sixty per cent of the people, of which the majority are Javanese. Javanese culture and political influence have always dominated Indonesia. This is because in Central Java wet-rice growing on a large-scale was established very early, enabling a food surplus and the consequent development of a civilisation which could support the artisans and artists who developed the arts into one of the major streams of Asian culture. The marvel of Borobodur, gracious court dances, entrancing shadow–puppet theatre, intricate batik designs and hypnotic gamelan orchestras are the best known examples. However, the island of Java is also home to other significant ethnic groups, including the Sundanese majority in West Java and the Madurese minority in East Java, while Jakarta itself has been a racial and cultural melting-pot from the beginning. Although Java has been traditionally the rice bowl of Indonesia, the other, less populated, islands have always been more productive in export commodities, including spices, rubber, oil, minerals, timber and palm-oil.
British traders had been visiting the trading ports of Banten and Sunda Kelapa (Jakarta) at the western end of the north coast of Java as long as the Dutch. However, after some very ugly incidents like the Amboyna massacre, the two countries agreed that the East Indies was big enough for both of them and Java was yielded to the Dutch. From its inception in 1602 until its demise in 1799 the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), the Dutch East India Company, helped enrich Holland and turned Sunda Kelapa into Batavia, its headquarters and the Queen of the Orient. However, since the 1700s Holland, bled by European wars, had been in decline and the VOC, through corruption, was bankrupt. In 1806 Holland was absorbed into the French Empire, as were its colonial possessions. Batavia, in her prime the Queen of the Orient, had lost her bloom and was more of a distressed dowager.
Raffles’s brilliant mind quickly gained an impressive knowledge and understanding of the whole region, soon developing a practical plan to incorporate the Dutch East Indies into the British mercantile empire. He won the confidence of the Governor-General in Calcutta, Lord Minto, by proving that, contrary to popular prejudice, the Malacca Strait was navigable for large ships by sending a warship to chart a route among the coral reefs. This alternative to the Sunda Strait immediately facilitated the invasion of Java and in the longer term provided a new route for Far Eastern trade. After this navigational coup, Minto entrusted him with planning the invasion of Java and subsequently with the Lieutenant Governorship of the island. The political motive for the conquest of Java was the conflict with the Napoleonic Empire, while the strategic motive was the EIC's growing dismay at Dutch control over the Sunda Strait, the major route to the Far East, which they exercised from their naval base at Batavia.
The British forces sailed from Calcutta, landed at Cilincing, west of Tanjung Priok and occupied the city of Batavia (now the suburb of Kota), which had been deserted by the combined Dutch and French forces. This Napoleonic army made a strategic retreat to the strongly fortified position in the area of Meester Cornelis a little over three kilometres south-east of where the church now stands. A small battle was fought at a roadblock at Weltevreeden on 10 August a few hundred metres east of where the church now stands. The British then pushed southward and laid siege to the enemy position of Cornelis. It had a perimeter of 8 kilometres and is now the area known as Kebon Manggis, Kampung Melayu and Jatinegara. The two longest sides were formed by the Ciliwung, and a canal known as the Slokan. The main British assault came on 26 August and turned into a rout with the remnants of the Napoleonic forces retreating to Buitzenborg (Bogor). It is at this point that history first intersects with present-day All Saints. For in a shady spot in front of the church lies a heavy gravestone. Regular sweeping has kept the epitaph clean of lichen, so the visitor can still read:
Here lie the Remains of Lieutenant Colonel WILLIAM CAMPBELL of His Britannic Majesty’s 78th Regt who died on the 28th of Aug, 1811 of Wounds received on the 26th of that Month while bravely leading on his Regt to attack the strongly fortified Lines of CORNELIS defended by a gallant Enemy. To Him, who living was beloved by all for his gentle Manners, and his manly Virtues; Who in Death; merited and received the Applause of his Country; To Him, the Companion of many happy Years, and the Father of her Children; this frail Memorial of unperishing Regard is erected by his afflicted Widow.
I have tried to visualise the scene in the pre-dawn light of 26 August 1811. A dark mist would have hung over the Ciliwung thick and acrid from the gunpowder. The crack of muskets and the crash of cannons was mingled with the whinneying of horses and the cries of men. Lieutenant Colonel William Campbell of the 78th led his highlanders along the high road, and charged across the ditch and through the palisade under a rain of grape and musketry, throwing Napoleon's men back. One minute he was waving his sword, urging his men forward, with the Gaelic war cry, "Tulloch Ard". The next, he was felled by a huge blow to his thighs. His men continued to surge forward urged on by the compelling music of the bagpipes and the scent of victory. Only his aide stopped to attend to his fallen master. Rolling him on to his back he saw that his thighs had been ripped and the bones shattered by grape-shot, fired at close-range from a cannon. The aide knew immediately that Campbell was doomed to an agonising death. Amputation was useless. He died two days afterwards and was quickly buried at the old cemetery near the Main Post Office. It would have been a puzzling scene to the inquisitive local Malay families. The rows of sunburned giants facing the grave. The notes of a solitary piper piercing the awed silence. The lowered banner with the elephant badge. The 78th Regiment wore the distinctive Green Mackenzie tartan and tall bearskin hats. They were known as the "Ross-shire buffs" because of the pale, buffalo leather facings on their red coats. The men of Ross-shire are noted for their height, which derives from their Viking ancestry. The regiment had been raised 20 years before by the Mackenzie chieftain, and included 300 of his own crofters. In the succeeding years they had won glory in India, particularly at the battle of Assaye, so their banner featured an elephant and the single word "Assaye". These highlanders had a reputation for esprit de corps and good behaviour that was maintained not by the brutal discipline common at the time, but by an appeal to an ancient sense of honour.
Of the 12,000 British troops who set out from India, about one quarter was sick by the time they landed in Java. From the 10-26 August, there were 889 casualties comprising 143 killed, 733 wounded and 13 missing. British forces subsequently established control over the whole of Java and South Sumatra by smaller battles at Semarang, Palembang and Yogyakarta. Raffles also stamped out piracy by destroying pirate nests, the biggest being at Sambasse in north-west Borneo.
Although not a soldier Raffles was nevertheless a hero, and like all heroes he faced his many hardships with courage. These included chronic ill-health, which seemed to plague any European who sought to live an energetic life in the tropics, tragedies like the deaths of his first wife at Batavia, his children, his sister and brother-in-law later in Bencoolen, and the disastrous loss by fire of his manuscripts and important collection of botanical and zoological specimens prior to his return to England. Then there was the enmity of those who should have been friends and allies. When researching the Raffles era I came across a glaring case of malicious bias in Major Thorn’s Conquest of Java, an absorbing eyewitness account of the British conquest of the Dutch East Indies and a useful description of the geography, culture and economy of the various islands. It has recently been republished as a facsimile edition with delightful maps and prints. Oddly, it omits any reference to Raffles. In a breathtakingly vindictive manner, Thorn had written him out of the book. He had taken the side of General Gillespie, his superior officer, who nursed a bitter grudge against the civilian governor and tried to destroy his career. In spite of all this, Raffles was not deterred and in 1819 founded and subsequently nurtured Singapore, again earning the wrath of a military man, Major Farquhar.
Although the British occupation of Java, from 1811 to 1816, was a brief interlude in three and a half centuries of Dutch rule, it is looked upon as a significant period of enlightened government and reform. Raffles had an imperial vision of a confederacy of Malay states extending from Aceh to Mindanao, under the Governor-General in Calcutta. Civilising measures would include suppression of slavery and piracy, encouragement of trade, codification and reformation of Malay law and, pertinently, the propagation and protection of Christianity. It is the last of these measures that is important to our story. Although not an evangelical Christian himself, he was nevertheless overtly supportive of Christian missions, becoming the Founding Patron of the Java Auxiliary of the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) in 1814. Much of this was due to his close relationship to his cousin, Rev. Thomas Raffles, a Congregationalist minister in Liverpool and a Director of the London Missionary Society. They were both great men in their fields and engaged in regular correspondence. So it was Thomas Raffles who urged the other Thomas Raffles to establish Protestant missions in Java.
First of the missionaries to be welcomed by Raffles was William Robinson of the Calcutta-based Baptist Missionary Society (BMS), who arrived in 1813 to work among the Javanese, being soon joined by Trowt, Reily and Phillips. The BMS found the Javanese more resistant than other groups they were working among, so interest in the Java Mission soon waned, leaving Robinson alone in Java. In Batavia he found opportunities to work among the English-speaking military, also learning Malay so he could work among the Muslim people of Batavia. He is important to our story when he appears later as one of the links between the Raffles era and the founders of the church.
The missionary cohorts were further strengthened by the arrival in May 1814 of three missionaries of the Nederlands Zendeling-Genootschap under the auspices of the LMS. They were the Germans Kam, Brückner and Supper. Kam soon transferred to work in Ambon and Brückner to Semarang in Central Java, where his views on baptism changed, and he transferred to the BMS. Raffles appointed Supper as minister of the Dutch Church in Batavia and assisted him in founding the aforementioned Java Auxiliary of the British and Foreign Bible Society, of which he became the Secretary. Until his death in 1817, Supper worked in Batavia, where he preached to the native Christians, and distributed Chinese scriptures and tracts. Another German LMS missionary, Thomsen, arrived in 1816 to work among the Malays, but his wife’s poor health led to their removal in 1817. It is worth recording Raffles’ rather indulgent opinion of some of these missionaries in a letter of 1815 to the Rev. Thomas Raffles. He wrote that Supper “is a good, simple creature, rather silly but amiable…. He is doing very well.” Trowt “is not doing much…. He has been very unwell….” Raffles also recorded the personal assistance he gave to these men, counselling Supper who had been in love, helping Trowt in some financial difficulties and providing Milne with information about the Javanese.